


Insecurity

by A_Letter_From_Kurian



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Afro-Latino Carlos, Artistic Writing Styles used Liberally: Proceed at your own Risk!, Black Cecil, CodeSwitch!Cecil, Discussions of Past Trauma, M/M, POC Cecil, Person of Color Cecil, Spoilers for Old Oak Doors B, TW: Discussions of Anti-Black Racism, Takes place between Years 1 and 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-08 14:22:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5500544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Letter_From_Kurian/pseuds/A_Letter_From_Kurian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Surely you've always believed yourself to be beautiful?<br/>Isn't that right?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Insecurity

**Author's Note:**

> Hello everyone! Before I get started, let me just preface by saying: Toni Morrison did it better. And if it wasn't her, it was probably Mrs. Octavia. But I'll be damned if I didn't get a shot at me n' mine!
> 
> Secondly, this is a fic that I've been hesitant to share on many fronts; as a Black genderqueer, as a Nigerian, as someone who is light enough not to get the full brunt, but still had shitty complexes pushed on them. This is my way of working that out. Please respect that.
> 
> Thirdly: My Cecil code-switches. This may be something that I will expand on someday, or maybe not. But you WILL respect that and the fact that it reps the Vale that he's from.
> 
> Finally: Staying true to myself, I couldn't help but to punctuate my writing with the everyday text speak that we accept as language. Let's hope if formats. If it doesn't there will be a link to the Google Doc at the end. Enjoy!

Insecurity 

 

Sometimes it isn’t enough to just be able to hold yourself tight enough, look yourself in the mirror, whisper the words “I'm beautiful” and have that be enough on rough days. Not on days when the Glow Cloud literally rains maggot-infested deer on your front porch. Not on days when Telly the Godforsaken Barber fucks up your line-up. Not on days when the plantains up and crawl out of the bowl only to be devoured by gnashing potholes; or when the Faceless Old Woman smears the last of your Mother’s Palm oil all over the walls and mocks it by calling it “smelly”. Or maybe she’s mocking your mother. Or... you. Yep, she’s definitely mocking _you_.

You have to constantly occasionally remind yourself _‘It isn’t always about you and how you feel, Cecil. None of this is.’_ or _‘Sheesh, you KNOW that you’re good enough, why are you all up in ya’ damn feelings about it, Ceece?’_ It’s okay, really, you’re not all that worried about having to play second fiddle to a irrelevent, yet brooding construct that glorified dry straw, hamstring thinness, and sickening stardust that hacked up acidic mediocrity over the floors of your recording booth. No need to worry about expectations that’d much rather treat Maggie Cubes and Adobo like the next hipster trend for summoning endless wailing instead of the cooking necessity that they are. I mean, it’s okay, really. I mean REALLY. It’s- you’re _okay._

And it’s not like you don’t go to bed worried sick about believing that you’re gonna get passed over at times. But it’s okay, because you’re great! You’re a radio host, and a great bowler, and an awesome fanfic writer, and you have the sweetest cat ever! You have a niece that loves you, a sister you should talk to more often, and a brother-in-law who can be... decent, at times, even if he is a jerk. You have friends, and interns who care about you, and angles that Definitely Do Not Exist to (not) guide you in times of crisis and destabilizing of each fearful, vibrating atom in your body. So maybe it’s okay that every once in awhile, you break down and cry because you don’t feel loved.

 

~

And then, he arrives.

He’s stunning. Gorgeous, really. A strong, slender square jaw, teeth straight like a military cemetery, poised with a bright killer smile... but the first thing you recognize is his hair. like yours, JUST like yours, except that it’s not. Yours is way kinkier, and shirks away from your hands in resistance and the street cleaners in fear. It grows out in coarse, frayed bunches of jet black hair with the occasional bioluminescent streak of purple. It’s not that it’s not likeable, it’s just that you never thought anything special of it. His is a tad looser, but still curly, and the gentle brush of silver at his temples reminds you of the glowing streaks in your hair.  

Before you know it, the words “Carlos’s Perfect Hair” come tumbling out of your mouth and through your lips. They taste beautiful in your mouth, they sing a hymn on your tongue and beat out a riddim against your teeth. They start to compose themselves as lyrics draped against the back of your throat, words that you hum to yourself at times. As you heard the lyrics crackle along the airwaves and into the speakers of your radio station, there is a quiet part of you that holds a bottle with a secret that never spills. You stuffed it on a cluttered shelf full of sores and old aches and rusty pains; an elixir of hope that sings _‘Well, if I fell in love with his hair, then maybe_ **_I’ll_ ** _fall in love with mine too.’_

~

Sooner or later, you start noticing even more important things about Carlos that are most certainly perfect. The way he shuffles around awkwardly while fumbling for a beautiful explanation to describe the inexplicable. The way he goes about comparing and contrasting the clocks in Night Vale with the clocks he had grown up with; the ones that he would take apart and rebuild over and over again as a child. They way his eyes glitter like refracted Zircon gems against an overexpressive canvas. The sweet, oaky tones that he hummed occasionally while he was dilly-dallying of playfully bopping to tunes he could only interpret with equations and endless logic. You notice these things, and you notice that they are perfect.

That one fateful night when he finally leans over to kiss you, you notice other things. You notice the way his hair curls to frame yours when you lean in close. You notice that he weaves a delicate-dark skinned hand in yours. You notice that your heartbeats synchronize with the endless twinkling stars in the sky, the low thrum of bass-boosted trap beating in the background, and the diffusion of warmth that could only be created by the caress of soft lips that kissed you without fear or hesitation. You pull apart, and you realize something important under the light of an orbiting rock that steals its’ shine from a slowly dying star.

You notice _‘His skin almost blends in with mine, and he loves me too.’_

_~_

The imperfections of what you fell in love with come to you as easily as the stumbles and falls of early childhood- rough and tumble; met with unexpected bursts of feeling from the heart. The differences are both wide and narrow; with the consolations of adult reasoning and the naivete of falling in love; you eventually learn to see the cracks in a perfect gem. You also learn to see the cracks mirrored back at you and accept your imperfections for what they are.

 

  * He chews with his mouth open.
  * He’s often late for dates. (But to be fair, so are you!)
  * You both get caught up in your work. (Busy! Busy!!)
  * Sometimes you worry that you’re throwing yourself a little too much into your relationship? But that’s what Josie and Dana and John Peters (y’know, the Farmer) are for!



Sometimes there are moments when you look at yourself in the mirror and say to yourself out loud “Well no wonder he #Chose me! why, lookit what he’s #Chosen!” You do a haughty, over exaggerated laugh and smile a smile with you sharp canines showing too well, all while booty popping to the music in you head and swinging your cornrowed hair around. The trap music in your head slightly fades away as your anxieties start start to echo in your mind instead.

_‘It’s temporary.’_

_‘He’ll probably die eventually, y’know.’_

_‘What if he moves on to something else? Someone else?’_

_‘What if I have to let go?’_

_‘What if I’m just using him as a Band-Aid? Or a security blanket for the fears that I can’t remove through re-education? What if-’_

 

Your phone buzzes. It’s a text from Dana, getting back to you after getting out of yet **another** time loop. Grateful for a distraction, you let your insecurities slide off your shoulders. The rest of your night is spent sending cat pictures to your friend while the pre-recorded series of Endless Gargling Pebbles plays softly in the background. Things will get better. They have to.

~

“Cecil, why do you love my hair so much?”

The two of you are sitting on the front porch. You have a braid in your hand, the kinky hair crinkling in betwixt your fingers as you detangle it. Carlos is sitting on a pillow behind you, a orange rattail comb being twirled between his fingers. The little naps that he gently pulls away from your scalp make you wince, and you feel him pat your hair and hums an apology.

“Your... perfect hair?”

“...Yes?”

“Because... because it’s so _soft._ ” You turn around and touch the gray tints near his temples. “It smells _so_ _sweet_ , it always looks great, you don’t do much of anything to it before you go out.  You keep it so well even in this desert heat, and it never seems to dry out. And... and it also reminds me a little bit of mine?” The last statement is said with a whisper as you turn back around. In your flustered state, the crinkly hairs starts unraveling in between your fingers again.

“Well actually, I’m kinda jealous of yours.”

“rEALLy?!”

“Um...yeah?” You can’t see it, but you know Carlos is doing that lovable thing where he fumbles and finds the beautiful words to describe things that Normally Shouldn’t Be Described. “I mean, hair is basically made up of Keratin, which is more or less clusters of dead skin cells hardened together to stretch through several layers of skin and reside on our scalps, but... Cecil your hair is so, so pretty! It’s super curly, and bouncy, and I like the way it clings close to you, but also _not_ close to you? Like the way it reaches towards the sky? And, well, uhm- there’s also the fact that parts of it grow **purple** and its’ _bioluminescent_ , but Cecil! Cecil, your hair is beautiful too, just like everything else about you.”

By this time, Carlos is hugging you tightly from behind, rocking you back and forth, placing kisses on your neck and running his finger through your now glowing hair. “Cecil baby, can I tell you a story?” You faintly giggle and bemuse him with a drowsy “ _Hm_?” of your own.

“When I was a small child, my Mamá would sit me in her lap or in front of the couch while watching telenovelas on TV and braid my hair just like yours. She said it reminded her of back when she would stay with her grandparents back in the Dominican Republic; her Abuelo would pick up seashells for her from fishing trips and her Abuela would use them as decorations for the end of each braid.”

“That’s beautiful, Carlos.”

“I know. Although my favorite was when she was extra gentle with her braiding and she would say, ‘You know Carlos, each part in your head is like a row of soil being tilled for my love for you.’  Then she’d smother me with kisses.”

You take the hand that was splayed against your stomach and kiss it. He laughs.

“It went on like that until I was ten years old. There was this one day my mother had taken me to a new grocery store just up the road, so we walked. We went there because the bodega that I lived a few blocks away from was robbed a couple nights before, and I was too scared to go down there for dulce de guayaba or my favorite dulce de leche pops. So after she had braided my hair, she took me to the new store to buy some formula for my baby sister, and some candies for me.”

“Was it as nice as the Ralph’s here?”

“Oh much nicer, actually. I’ll never forget how clean and shiny everything was. The floors were shiny. The plastic bags were shiny. Even the fruit looked plastic, and the meat looked like high-polished sculpted wax. I was almost afraid to touch anything, until I had seen the candy aisle. I tugged on my Mamá’s sleeve and asked if I could look at what they had. She smiled, patted my head and sent me along. She said since I was extra good, that I could get two things.”

Carlos takes time to shift his legs not only to adjust to the discomfort of his sitting position, but to adjust to what you could sense was lurking behind the perfect gloss and sheen of a candy aisle. You kiss his hand again.

“So I went to pick out my candies. And the thing is, back at the bodega I would always pick out two or three candies and compare sizes so then I could find the biggest one. Sometimes the store owner would just kinda.... I dunno, shake his head and helped me pick out the biggest ones. I trusted the ones that made him smile the most. But the store owner at this store... he wasn’t like that.” Carlos shifts again. “I guess that when he saw my hand full of candy and the fact that my mom wasn’t with me, he, well- he assumed that I was just going to steal it. And I wasn’t! I was going to explain that I was just picking out the biggest one, but my Spanish came out before my English did, and when I tried to correct myself it was too late because they got mixed up, and then... and then he yanked me by my hair and told me ‘Touch anything in this store with your dirty fingers and you’ll never see your rattails ever again.’ “

At this point, you can’t help but turn around. You can’t see his tears, but you know _something_ about him is crying somewhere, so you place soft kisses everywhere you can.

“At that point my Mamá showed up and raised hell with that man. She nearly slapped him, but I think it was me grabbing her hand and crying, yelling, telling her to stop that saved her from being banned from there. It didn’t matter though, because she put the formula down, picked me up, and stormed out of that grocery store fast. We never went back there for as long as I lived in that area of San Diego.”

A moment passes. Your kisses subside, and h tucks a few strands of hair behind your ear. As the sun sets and the growls of potholes start grumbling on the onset of dinner, you chose to break the silence.

“ _Carlos_...”

“ _Cecil_...” He clasps your almost-matching hands in his. “Cecil, babe, would you braid my hair for me... please?”

You kiss him directly this time, and he tastes the ‘Yes’ on your lips.

~

That night, you make love to each other; him making love to you, you making love to him, and both of you learning to reconcile and make love to yourselves in turn. You confess that you fear that you run to him as some sort of perishable security blanket. {Quote} “ What if I’m just using you as a false sense of refugee from the whims that could just as easily kill you the way they’ve tried to kill me?! and trust me, they have tried!” {Unquote} He laughed, and merely replied that {Quote} “[He] constantly wishes he could shrink himself small enough to crawl into your heart and hide away from the dangers of life forever.” {Unquote}

It is enough to satisfy you, within the throes of passion and after. You fade to sleep, fingering gray strands of safety, acceptance, and self-love.

~

_“Cecil, hey. Um, it’s Carlos._

_I– I– I hate that I got your voicemail, but listen, I figured it out._

_So, we can’t shut the oak doors unless everyone is back where they belong. And every moment those doors are open, more of that light gets through into Night Vale. I couldn’t figure out why we couldn’t just keep the doors closed for good, and it was really frustrating to have a problem I couldn’t solve. And then I got sad, because I couldn’t solve it. But then I did solve it, and I felt so happy! So those are some – but not all – of the emotions that I had._

_Here is what I found. Night Vale is a place that is difficult to leave, and difficult to enter, and connecting a place as weird as that with a place as weird as this was causing a lot of…strain ion linear time and space. So…those native to Night Vale, Dana, John, the angry woman in the Intern shirt, all had to return home, and the masked army all had to come back here, which they did. Just moments ago, the last of them came back through the door._

_It is so exciting when you make a scientific discovery like that! I was very happy!_

_But then, as the last of the masked army members came through the door, it slammed shut and vanished. And I remembered that I am not from Night Vale._

_I remembered that, as far as the laws of the universe are concerned, it is not where I belong._

_Cecil, I don’t even remember how I got to Night Vale in the first place. I mean, where is Night Vale, even? But I promise I will find a way back. It’ll just take a couple of days, a week max._

_I’ll be fine. I’m a scientist._

_Cecil? A scientist is usually fine._

_Maybe a few weeks, I don’t know._

_The upside is Dana was right. I have had 97% battery all day, and decent reception! So we’ll at least get to talk every night._

_Best of luck at home._ **_I love you_ ** _.”_

You play the voicemail for what may be the 5th? 6th, or even thousandth time that night. You don’t really know because time has always been weird here, but after being high off the constant assorted rush of endorphins and adrenaline, additional stress after a revolution didn’t make for a good night’s sleep at all.

You look at the picture that he last sent you; the one where he’s showing off his cornrows while striking an elaborate pose. He’s wearing his trademark lab coat, with his lovely flannel shirt and his flattering jeans. Although you are absolutely certain that he’s wearing your Timbs and not his- oh yeah, those are definitely yours. (The purple sparkle ribbon laces suit him well!)

You are feeling uncertain. Proud. Affirmed. The insecurities are lurking underneath your bed, but you do not care. Carlos, sweet, tenderheaded, and determined Carlos is going to be okay. You are going to be okay. As you take a braid and twist it in between your fingers, you know that you two now share a bond that will carry you throughout the stresses, presses, and even the thinnings of your relationship. You will be fine.

_~_

_As for me? Welp, it’s time for my lunch break. Help yourself to the Shea Butter, Ceece!_

_-M.B._

**~Fin~**

 

**Author's Note:**

> Phew! With that, I leave you with my constant inspiration from the best video game that I've never played.  
> [ Undertale- Your Best Nightmare/Finale](https://youtu.be/h7bgLkdEFAE)
> 
> And the [ Link!](https://docs.google.com/document/d/13Oi6a9nguTFX24Gn-UrTajxFKuY6WSCpL03LA7UmxnY/edit?usp=sharing)


End file.
